At the homepage of the german section of the Mars Society there is an article posted yesterday in the evening saying that there is scientific and engineering work on unmanned airplanes for the Mars.

According to that article the favorite of the moment is a small engine based on solid propellant. Because only few weight is possible the article consideres the airplanes to make sense as testing new technologies only.

What do you think about this? And may that be an additional field for Burt Rutan/Scaled/Mojave? (Lightweight, solid (but not hybrid as SSO's) propellant)

The maximum flight time is 45 minutes for a maximum distance of 300 km.

The ARES-airplane seems to fly after entry and behaving like launching from higher altitude - compared to an airplane that would launch at the surface (=lower altitude) and go to the altitude of the ARES-airplane.

That airplane is propelled by rockets if I understand right. So it seems to be a mix of a rocket and an airplane.

It would be interesting to have a vehicle like this that can launch from the martian surface and land again at another martian place hundreds of kilometers away - repeatedly.

For the next Mars rover the skycrane will be developed as far as I know - why not making that skycrane a rocket-airplane too? Too large, too heavy? It will be able to hang in the atmosphere with the rover onboard - it's a pity that the skycrane itself doesn't get research-equipment.

1. can fly ballistical or airplane-like
2. winged
3. vertical take-off and landing like a Harrier
4. could carry a small rover
5. selfrefuels within about a month
6. uses liquified gas which is sent through a preheated pellet bed

Seems as it could go around the whole planet as the years go by and contribute to the search for favourable landing locations, station locations, settlement locations...

I'm not sure whether it will be possible for the craft to travel great distances as each hop is restricted to only a few 10s of kilometers if it uses a balistic trajectory instead of taking off and landing like a plane.

From the pictures I've seen of the Martian surface it seems pretty well covered in small rocks, not an ideal landing strip. For this reason I suspect that horizontal landings/take offs will not really be feasible. Still the low level aerial pictures it could take during each hop would prove very useful in surveying a large surface area.

_________________A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

because of the vertical take-off and -landing capability I am not that sure if horizontal take-off and -landing would be advantegeous anyway regardless of there being obstacles and danger in caese of the horizontal method.

By the way - the article explicitly says that the vertical method frees the aircraft from a special danger... at least I understand it that way.

Is it different to what Zubrin has said or done? I myself have no concrete imagination about how it is to fly on Mars. I only take it as a method Zubrin considers to be realistic - does it look differently?

Since the 1970s a succession of NASA engineers and scientists have dreamed about flying an unmanned airplane over the surface of Mars to take close-up photos and make other measurements. Dale Reed, a researcher at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., who died in 2005, earned a patent in 1977 on his design for a foldable Mars airplane called the Mini-Sniffer. In 1999, then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin revived the dormant idea by challenging NASA to fly a plane over Mars in time for the centennial of the Wright Brothers flight in 2003. Joel Levine of Langley twice proposed missions to deliver an airplane to Mars.

None of those proposals left the ground because of a combination of budget, scientific and technical challenges. Engineers at Ames and Langley have continued to work on their designs in wind tunnels and in high-altitude tests, and today the idea of folding a plane inside a rocket and deploying it once it reaches Mars no longer seems as technically radical as it once did.

"I think there's actually relative agreement now that it's technically feasible and not terribly risky," said Larry Lemke, a mission designer at Ames.

Tether agreed. "There's no reason why we can't do this," he said

Quote:

On Mars, the airplanes that have been proposed would fly in the thin martian atmosphere at altitudes between 5,000 to 10,000 feet (1,524 meters to 3,048 meters). On Earth, that would be the equivalent of flying at 100,000 feet (30,480 meters), a perfect altitude for surveillance, Tether said.